Human Figure as a Cultural Mediator in Architectural Drawings

Abstract

In architectural drawings, human figures generally express the scale of design space. Their presence is supposed to be a sign of a particular sensibility toward human scale and needs and over the centuries, figures were capable of playing a number of different cultural roles. From the anthropomorphic attitudes of Renaissance architects to the Functionalists' diagrams, human figures have illustrated and mediated the cultural development of human environment. Even if architects maliciously used them to convey layered meanings into their architectural renderings, they are an implicit index of different ideas about men and women and express architects' ideological positions toward society often beyond their intents. This paper analyzes the use of human figures in architectural designs with a particular attention to the twentieth century, to the passage from the mechanical to the digital age, in which the diffusion of cut-and-paste procedure is changing and enhancing their use in the globalized architecture.